Several times a day, I receive requests from people who want to write a “guest post” on my blog. They are from individuals who seem desperate to have link-backs from this blog (and also from SmallBusiness.com, which is neither a blog nor does it carry “posts.” However, we do post articles on the site.)

Often, they are written like this one I received earlier today:

Since long time I have been following your blog and had read most of your article which is very useful and informative.

When I receive “guest blog” requests like this one spit out by Google translate, I immediately click the spam button.

If I did not receive so many of these email schemes, I’d take time to point to one of Google’s several warnings on why someone shouldn’t be so desperate to succeed in practices that end up hurting them.

Over the weekend, I took some photos of a couple of Nashville bike- and walk-friendly projects that have been planned for years but are now “for-real.” If you’re not interested in Nashville bicycle infrastructure, don’t feel lonely. One of this blog’s 12 readers is bound to find Nashville’s bike and walking infrastructure a riveting topic.

I-440 Greenway (Construction-Phase 1)

This set of photos (embedded from my Flickr account where each photo is annotated) are of the first phase of a stretch of greenway that runs adjacent to Nashville’s “inner-loop,” I-440. Even life-long Nashvillians would be challenged to know where the photos of the underpass are located, so I’ve embedded a Google Map below the photos. This section goes from Murphy Road to Centennial Park. The “magic” part of this greenway that few people with find hard to believe is the under-pass that goes under 440 rather than over it (like the current Acklen Park Ave. Bridge). When the greenway is completed, it will become a popular, safe and family-friendly bike/walk route to Centennial Park and the Vanderbilt area from neighborhoods west and north of this greenway (especially after the graffiti is removed).

Where the heck is this?

One the map, the bike icon is the location of the underpass.

Division Street Extender

I added a photo of Froogal McDoogals (a liquor store that anchors one end of the bridge) so that Nashvillians could quickly vector in on the location. For urban transportation wonks, the design of the bridge is called a Complete Street or “multimodal.” This simply means that the street was conceived as a passage not only for people driving cars but also with designated and protected lanes for people on bicycles and people walking. And when I say, “protected,” I don’t mean the white plastic separators going up around town (which I’m all for), but I’m referring to the metal kind you can see in the photos. The bridge and the approaches on each end are designed to connect “the Gultch” to Second Avenue, nearby the Music City Center.

The Internet Archive (in my book, one of the few “wonders of the internet”) is now using a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law (Section 108h) which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. (Note: While I am not an anti-copyright advocate, I believe that certain types of copyrights should sunset in 14 years, renewable once if the copyright holder took actions to renew it. That’s 28 years. Okay, round it up to 30. But forever? At the bottom of this post, there’s a link to two articles I wrote on SmallBusiness.com about Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and their beliefs on the topic.)

If the Founding Fathers had their way, almost all works from the 20th century would be public domain by now (14-year copyright term, renewable once if you took extra actions).

Some corporations saw adding works to the public domain to be a problem, and when Sonny Bono got elected to the House of Representatives, representing part of Los Angeles, he helped push through a law extending copyright’s duration another 20 years to keep things locked-up back to 1923. This has been called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act due to one of the motivators behind the law, but it was also a result of Europe extending copyright terms an additional twenty years first. If not for this law, works from 1923 and beyond would have been in the public domain decades ago.

Today we announce the “Sonny Bono Memorial Collection” containing the first books to be liberated. Anyone can download, read, and enjoy these works that have been long out of print. We will add another 10,000 books and other works in the near future.

Professor Townsend Gard had two legal interns work with the Internet Archive last summer to find how we can automate finding appropriate scanned books that could be liberated, and hand-vetted the first books for the collection. Professor Townsend Gard has just released an in-depth paper giving libraries guidance as to how to implement Section 108(h) based on her work with the Archive and other libraries. Together, we have called them “Last Twenty” Collections, as libraries and archives can copy and distribute to the general public qualified works in the last twenty years of their copyright.

Sidenote by Rex: Here are a couple of articles I wrote a few years ago for SmallBusiness.com about the founding fathers, patents, and copyrights.

Video from last night’s “cold opening” of Saturday Night Live included a hopeful message on the tee-shirt of Jason Aldean’s dobro player. (The opening was Jason Aldean singing Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down.”) Did some googling and found the source of the message:

“Spread Love. It’s the Nashville Way.”

I wish it were always true; that “the Nashville way” is all about spreading love. I’ve seen lot’s of examples of Nashvillians spreading love. But I’ve examples of the opposite, also.

I wish spreading love was everyone’s way.

But we all fall short.

But I still think I’ll get one of the shirts to remind me to keep trying.

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Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)